Scrapbooking For Alzheimer’s – Flashback Friday #4

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This post is the fourth post from my Flashback Friday series! Flashback Friday is a series in which I share with a you a post from my blog archives every Friday!

I’ve been blogging since 27th April 2007 so I think it’s fair to say I have A LOT of posts in my archives. I moved from Blogger to WordPress in 2013 and for now, for convenience, I’m going to be sharing posts from my WordPress archives, but eventually I will go through my old hard drives and pull out all of the Blogger archives too!

The post that I’m going to be re-sharing with you all today is a post that I originally published on January 21st 2013.

The post was called ‘Scrap-Booking For Alzheimer’s!.’

To date the original version of this post has 51,000 views!

From this point on it’ll be the original post, the only thing I’ve added is some new tags and images, I haven’t included pictures of my actual scrapbook because I don’t want to put those pictures out there on the internet, but I added some scrapbooking pictures just to jazz the post up a bit!

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I’ve been bitten by the scrap-booking bug..

I’ve recently come across hundreds of pictures from when I was growing up, from when my Dad was growing up and from when my Nan and Granddad were growing up too! (Admittedly there’s not many of the latter but really did you expect them to photograph everything? There was a war on!)

Rather than leave them all to gather dust in their many albums and cases I decided to scrapbook them because really is there a better way to showcase photos?!

As I’ve been going along and finding more and more precious memories of my childhood I’ve been taking my scrapbooks in to show my Granddad, since he features in one way or another on I’d say about 90% of the photos (whether that’s because he’s in the photo, it was taken in his house / garden or it was somewhere we went together).

I found that although his eyes aren’t what they used to be and he often has trouble making the subject of the photographs out that if I explain the picture to him and talk to him about it, maybe talking about what we were doing or where we were it triggers memories that Alzheimer’s has yet to destroy and we can reminisce for a little while.

It’s been really lovely for me to sit and talk about my childhood with him again and to think that although he may not remember all he still remembers some of the good times we had and we can still laugh about things!

Not only is scrap-booking a wonderful opportunity for me to look back and laugh at how simple, happy and carefree my life was when I was younger but it’s provided me with the chance to make my Granddad happy and help him momentarily remember things that he had otherwise forgotten.

I think it’s a wonderful idea for anyone who is caring for someone with Alzheimer’s or maybe just an elderly person to look back on reminisce on the good times because hell knows there’s no fun in growing old and becoming a mere shadow of your former self.

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If you’d like to see the original version of this blog post please click here.

I’ve actually filled a few scrapbooks with photos since I wrote that blog post, Grandad’s Alzheimer’s is in a way now that communication despite how hard we try has become very difficult and so showing him photographs would do nothing except aggravate him because he doesn’t understand.

That’s it for this edition of Flashback Friday! If you’d like to reminisce some more then please click here to be redirected to the Flashback Friday section of my blog!